World Englishes;

Dec 2010, Vol. 29

Issue 4, pp.
467-480.
Creativity and Discourse

Rodney H. Jones
City University of Hong Kong

To appear in World Englishes

Abstract

In this paper I will consider the relationship between discourse analysis and
creativity and elucidate the ways in which a discourse analytical approach to
creativity might be distinguished from the 'language and creativity' approaches
which currently dominate applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. In the
discourse and creativity approach I will be describing, creativity is located not
in language per se, but in the strategic ways people use language in concrete
situations in order to stimulate social change. I will explore how aspects of this
approach are reflected in work carried out within the paradigm of World
Englishes.

Keywords: applied linguistics, creativity, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics,
stylistics

Over the past few decades there has been considerable interest in the
fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics in the relationship between
language and creativity (see for example Cater 2004, Cook 1994, 2000, Crystal
1998). Although many studies on language and creativity make use of various
tools and theories from discourse analysis, few explore creativity in light of the
broader social, cultural and critical dimensions of discourse that are the focus of
much current work in the field (see for example Bhatia, Flowerdew and Jones
2008). In this paper I will attempt to lay out the principles of a discourse
analytical approach to creativity that takes these dimensions into account, and to
differentiate such an approach from the language and creativity paradigm that
currently dominates applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. I will then illustrate
these principles with examples of studies that I believe exemplify them and
consider their relevance to the field of World Englishes.
According to Swann and Maybin (2007), research in language and
creativity has broadly defined creativity as a property of all language use in that
language users do not simply reproduce but recreate, refashion, and
recontextualize linguistic and cultural resources in the act of communicating.
This definition is telling, for it locates creativity in the ways in which linguistic
resources themselves are recreated and reconfigured rather than in the acts of
communicating for which they are used. Despite the implicit focus in Swann and
Maybins definition on language use and language users, most work in the
language and creativity paradigm has primarily emphasized the formal aspects
of language in use and has only dealt secondarily with the ways language as it is
used in situated social contexts helps to create new kinds of identities, social
practices and relationships of power. Herein lies the primary difference between
approaches that focus on language and creativity and the discourse and
creativity approach I will propose: while the former are concerned with what
might be called linguistic creativity, locating creativity in words and how they
are put together to form texts, the latter locates creativity in the concrete social
actions that people use these words and texts to perform. So, while language and
creativity enthusiasts concern themselves with literary works and the
literariness of everyday speech (Carter 2004), those taking the kind of approach
I am suggesting often concern themselves with texts which few would consider
literary or necessarily creative -- AIDS prevention pamphlets (Jones 2007),
pharmaceutical labels (Jones 1998), corporate disclosure reports (V. Bhatia
2007, 2008), and the speeches of George W. Bush (A. Bhatia 2007) -- but which
demonstrate how language can be used in strategic ways in concrete social
contexts to create fundamental changes in the world in which we live.

Language and Creativity

Research within the language and creativity paradigm falls into two broad
categories: that which uses linguistic tools to analyze literary and creative works,
and that which aims to describe the creativity of everyday language.
Approaches within applied linguistics which take as their objects of study
literary works of art are perhaps best exemplified by the long tradition of
literary stylistics, a field of literary criticism which uses tools from linguistics to
analyze literary texts (see for example Fowler 1996, Leech and Short 1981,
Widdowson 1975). The way creativity is defined in this approach is primarily as
a function of patterns of formal features and linguistic idiosyncracies of
particular texts (Cook 1998:205). To be fair, stylisticians conception of
creativity is not totally limited to texts, but also takes into account the
relationship between texts and their social contexts. In fact, Jackobson, the
thinker whose work serves as the foundation for contemporary stylistics,
defined literariness as a property of texts and contexts (which) inheres in
patterns of language in use as opposed to patterns of language in isolation
(Simpson 2004:10). Nevertheless, most of the work in stylistics is primarily
product focused, locating creativity in the formal aspects of language use.
While traditional stylistics relies chiefly on tools of linguistic and
grammatical analysis (more and more undertaken through computer aided
analyses of large corpora of data see for example Semino and Short 2004) there
is also a well-established practice of using tools from discourse analysis in
subfields of stylistics that have come to be known as discourse stylistics
(Simpson and Hall 2002) or pragmatic stylistics (Black 2006). Scholars in these
areas have, for example, applied politeness theory and other pragmatic
perspectives to the study of literary and historical texts (Magnusson 1999),
conversation analysis to the study of fictional narrative (Norrik 2000), and
speech act theory to the exploration of the communicative dynamics that occur
between literary works and their readers (Pratt 1977). Among the most
influential applications of discourse analytical tools to the understanding of
literature is Cooks 1994 Discourse and Literature, in which he combines more
traditional stylistic perspectives on language form with schema theory, arguing
that the mental representations that readers bring to texts are often as
important as the language that makes up the texts. Since then there has been
increased interest in cognitive aspects of reader response in stylistics (see for
example Stockwell 2002).
Discourse analytical models of stylistics have sought even more than
traditional stylistics to take into consideration extra-textual aspects of
literariness, seeing it in terms of multiple intersections among texts, readers,
institutions, and sociocultural contexts (Simpson and Hall 2002: 136). They have
also made an important contribution to challenging the notion that literature is
the sole province of literariness, broadening the reach of their analysis to
domains like advertising (Cook 2001), journalism (Juker 1992), and casual
conversation (Carter 2004).
This challenge to traditional notions of literariness is perhaps most
convincingly taken up by Ron Carter in his 2004 book Language and Creativity:
The Art of Everyday Talk, in which he declares that linguistic creativity is not
simply a property of exceptional people but an exceptional property of all
people (13). Based on his analysis of the five million word CANCODE corpus of
spoken English, Carter argues that features associated with literary texts like
word play, rhyme, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, understatement, irony,
repetition and parallelism are actually common features in everyday language
and serve important social functions. The hard and fast distinction between
literary and non-literary language he argues is artificial and unhelpful, and
literariness is more usefully seen as a cline, with some uses of language judged
to be more or less literary based mainly on text-intrinsic linguistic features.
What is particularly useful about Carters work from a discourse
analytical point of view is his focus not just on creative forms but on the social
contexts in which these forms appear and the social functions which they
accomplish. Classifying the data in his corpus according to context types and
interactions types, he is able to argue that linguistic creativity is more often
associated with collaborative interactions between friends and intimates and
tends to serve the purpose of building solidarity.
Other researchers have also explored literary-like behavior in everyday
communication (see for example Cook 2000, Crystal 1998, Maybin and Swann
2006, Norrick 2000, Pomerantz and Bell 2007) and made comparable claims
about its pervasiveness. The focus of much of this work has been on the notion of
language play, or what Crystal (1998) calls the ludic function of language and
its social, cognitive and even evolutionary functions. In most cases, however, as
with literariness, play is defined as the manipulation of linguistic forms rather
than the use of language to creatively manipulate social situations.
What makes work such as this, even when it uses theoretical concepts and
analytical tools from discourse analysis, fall into the language and creativity
paradigm rather than the discourse and creativity model I will be proposing, is
that it primarily sees creativity as a property of texts. Even when they take socio-
pragmatic aspects of language use into account, researchers in this paradigm
tend to focus on the social functions of creative language (by which they usually
mean literary or poetic language) rather than the function of language (of all
kinds) in performing creative actions. According to Swann and Maybin (2007)
most work on language and creativity mainly concerns itself with poetic
creativity, in the sense that Jakobson (1960: 356) meant the term as a focus on
the message for its own sake rather than on the role of the message in the
broader social processes though which meaning, identities and social practices
are negotiated. Some in fact, including Widdowson (2008: 503), have questioned
this orientation, insisting that there is no distinctively poetic way of being
creative by focusing on the message form, but that creativity is a function of how
the message form interacts with other speech act conditions. Even work in this
paradigm that does attempt to account for these socio-pragmatic conditions,
however, such as that of Carter, often limits its scope to the immediate
conversational context of utterances rather than considering the broader social
or cultural contexts in which they are formed.
Work on language and creativity in sociolinguistics, especially from the
World Englishes perspective, on the other hand, though still primarily focusing
on the formal properties of language, has been much more concerned with the
social and cultural conditions of creativity. Central this line of thinking is the
notion of bilingual creativity, defined by Kachru (1985: 20) as those creative
linguistic processes which are the result of competence in two or more
languages (see also Kachru 1987). According to Kachru, bilingual creativity
involves two things: first, the production of texts which creatively mix linguistic
resources from one or more languages, a more product focused approach similar
to that common in stylistics, and second, the use of verbal strategies in which
subtle linguistic adjustments are made for psychological, sociological, and
attitudinal reasons (1985: 20), an approach much more in line with the
discourse analytical perspective I will be advocating. Both of these concerns have
been represented in the pages of World Englishes (though the former has tended
to dominate). In a content analysis of the journal on the occasion of its twenty-
fifth anniversary, Bolton and Davis (2006) noted that nearly a tenth of the
articles had been devoted to the topic of bilingual creativity.
Notable examples of research focusing on the literary works of bilingual
writers are Dissanayakes (1985) examination of how various South Asian
authors experiment with English to make it better accommodate South Asian
cultural experiences, and Osakwes (1999) discussion of how traditional Yorbu
literary conventions are incorporated into the English language poetry of Wole
Soyika. Such work highlights the complexity of questions of linguistic creativity
when multiple, linguistic and cultural traditions come into play and make strictly
formalist definitions of creativity based on features prevalent in the English
literary tradition seem rather narrow.
Such work suggests that bilingualism has the inherent potential to give
rise to a distinct form of literariness, which results when two, or more linguistic
textures and literary traditions are blended. Such contact literatures, says
Kachru (1986a:61) manifest a range of discourse devices and cultural
assumptions distinct from the ones associated with the native varieties of
English. In such cases, it is not just the text but language itself that is remade. In
this regard, sociolinguistic approaches to creativity, at least from the World
Englishes perspective, differ dramatically from the approaches of the
stylisticians discussed above, for while both focus on linguistic form as evidence
of creativity, for those coming at the issue from a World Englishes perspective,
the product, the particular literary work of art, is less important than the
processes of linguistic and cultural contact that give rise to such creativity.
One of the more interesting questions arising from the phenomenon of
bilingual creativity has to do with the kinds of strategies bilingual writers use to
overcome inevitable problems of cultural and linguistic translatability in their
work. Research into this question has particularly benefitted from the
application of tools from discourse analysis, which focus analysis as much on
contextual issues of comprehension as on linguistic form. Nelson (1988, 1992),
for example, has explored how bilingual authors from outer circle-English
backgrounds deal with possible issues of intelligibility by embedding innovative
language use within a comprehensible and interpretable matrix of English
discourse, thereby gradually teaching the reader to comprehend both new
variety and text-specific innovations (1992:180).
At the same time, there has also been work within this paradigm that
looks at literary works of art from a strictly formalist perspective, revealing little
about the strategic ways authors negotiate multiple literary and cultural
traditions, though nonetheless contributing to our understanding of linguistic
variation. One example is Baker and Eggingtons (1999) use of computational
methods to analyze a large corpus of literary works written in a number of
different varieties of English in terms of the frequency of certain grammatical
features (verb tenses, pronouns, kinds of reference, relative clauses). While such
work confirms rhetorical and linguistic differences in work by authors using
different varieties of English, it does little to explain if and why such differences
are creative. The only thing linking this approach to the notion of bilingual
creativity is the fact that the texts analyzed are a priori deemed to be creative.
As in applied linguistics, there is also a focus within the World Englishes
paradigm not just on works of literature but also on the everyday creativity of
bilinguals as evidenced in domains like journalism, commerce and casual
conversation. In this work as well there are examples which define creativity
strictly on the level of formal innovation, and so are less satisfying from a
discourse analytical point of view, and those which focus more on the strategic
and creative uses of linguistic innovations such as code mixing and style shifting
in specific situations or sociocultural contexts. An illustration of the former
approach can be seen in work like that of Baumgardner (2006), which catalogues
the use of English in Mexican shop signs, brand names and advertisements, but
only gives a cursory explanation as to why such code-mixing should
automatically be considered creative or what social functions it serves. In
contrast are studies that, while focusing on formal innovation, nevertheless
approach it in the context of larger issues like power and identity (see for
example Lin 2000, Martin 2007, Rampton 2005). There are also studies that
focus on broader pragmatic features of bilinguals interaction and how they are
used in creative ways (see for example Dsouza 1988, Y. Kachru 1993). Much of
this work, however, still falls into the language and creativity paradigm due to
its bias towards linguistic creativity the novelty or inventiveness of linguistic
products.
Just as form focused treatments of everyday creativity in applied
linguistics tend to conflate the creative with the poetic, sociolinguistic
treatments of it tend to conflate the creative with the novel or the hybrid, so
that almost any adaptation or variation in a language or mixture of resources
from more than one language can be seen as an example of bilingual creativity.
Most definitions of creativity, however, demand more than just novelty, seeing
creativity as involving both the new and the valuable (Boden 1990), the novel
and the appropriate (Sternberg 1990), the original and the fitting (Pope 2005).
While some treatments of linguistic variation do consider its appropriateness for
certain contexts or its utility on helping language users to negotiate situated
activities, identities, and even larger sociopolitical phenomena like colonialism
and globalization, (see for example Dissanayake 1985), some are content simply
with arguing about the novelty or distinctiveness of various linguistic forms. For
the discourse and creativity perspective I propose, a concern with value is
absolutely central -- not in the sense of aesthetic value -- but rather in the sense
of pragmatic value, the extent to which our so called creative uses of language
actually help us to accomplish things in the material world and in our
relationships with others.

Discourse and Creativity

If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present
generation I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what is
looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words.
-- Wittgenstein, Lecture on Aesthetics (1967)

Delineating what a discourse-based approach to creativity might be and
how it might differ from the language and creativity approaches discussed
above requires first that we define discourse, a term that is nearly as slippery as
creativity. According Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton (2001:1), definitions of
discourse tend to fall into three categories: those that define it as anything
beyond the level of the clause, those that define it as language use, and those that
define it as a broader range of practices associated with the social construction
of knowledge. The first definition, introduced by the linguist Zelig Harris in the
early fifties to describe the next level in an analytical hierarchy of morphemes,
clauses and sentences, is essentially formalist, not really taking us much beyond
the language and creativity model discussed above. It is the second two
definitions that are more useful, and I would argue that both of them together
must be part of a discourse analytical approach to creativity, for neither can be
properly understood without the other.
The idea of language use means different things to different people. For
some it simply means authentic language as opposed to the made-up examples
trafficked in by generative linguists. This is the sense in which Stubbs (1983)
means it when he calls discourse analysis the sociolinguistic analysis of natural
language. For others, language use means language as it occurs in particular
contexts: understanding the meaning of a text, they caution, can only be done
properly with reference to its context. Calls for work that explores the ways
creative linguistic forms are produced in particular sociohistorical and
interpersonal contexts have come from a number of scholars from within the
language and creativity paradigm (see for example Carter 2007, Maybin and
Swann 2007a). Simply widening the circumference of analysis to include the
things that are occurring around texts, however, or recognizing the co-
constructed nature of creative language (Maybin and Swann 2007b: 512), does
not necessarily constitute a discourse and creativity approach as long as
creativity is still defined based on text-intrinsic features.
For yet others, language use means the ways language is used to take
specific, concrete actions, how, in Austins famous formulation, we do things
with words. Here the focus is less on the language itself and more on the actions
it is used to take. Many approaches to discourse, in fact, most notably speech act
theory and conversation analysis see discourse itself as a kind of social action.
More recent approaches, specifically mediated discourse analysis and
multimodal discourse analysis, influenced by the work of Soviet psychologist Lev
Vygotsky (1978), have gone even further in privileging social action as the unit of
analysis, considering language as only one of a host of possible meditational
means which people use to take action in the world.
Rather than starting with language and asking what people do with it, such
action oriented approaches to discourse take as their starting point Goffmans
famous question: Whats going on here? and then go on to explore the role that
discourse plays in it. This perspective leads to a conceptualization of creativity
that sees it as residing in not language but rather in the actions people take with
language. There may, therefore, be nothing intrinsically creative about an
utterance or a text that comes under the scrutiny of such an approach -- i.e. there
may be no language play, no metaphors or puns or other rhetorical devices, and
it may not even be intrinsically original or inventive. Instead, what may be
creative may have more to do with the strategic way language is used, and what
may be created may not be an inventive linguistic product, but rather a new
way of dealing with a situation or a new set of social relationships.
This brings us to the third definition of discourse pointed out by Schiffrin
and her colleagues, one which comes less from linguistics and more from critical
cultural and sociological traditions of analysis. In this definition discourse is
often used as a count noun to describe socially informed systems of knowing,
being and acting. Gee, in order to distinguish between this definition and
discourse as language use adopts the practice of using a capital D, defining
Discourses as ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate
words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities (1996:127). Foucault
(1972), and after him, Fairclough (1992) use the term orders of discourse to
describe these systems, which Foucault defines as the group of statements that
belong to a single system of formation; thus I shall be able to speak of clinical
discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric
discourse (1972: 121).
For Foucault, the most important thing about orders of discourse is that
they exert incredible control over the way we act and think, so while small d
discourse and other meditational means allow us to take actions in the world,
the big D Discourses within which they are fixed exert all kinds of constraints
over the kinds of actions that can be taken. Social practice and Discourses, then,
are seen as mutually constitutive phenomena whereby what we say and do
instantiate and reproduce Discourses and Discourses determine what we are
able to say and do.
At the same time, Discourses themselves are neither stable nor monolithic
they are open to being compromised, undermined or transformed as they
interact with other Discourses. As Candlin and Maley (1997: 204) note,
Discourses consist of internally heterogeneous discursive practices whose
boundaries are in flux, so that, as they come into contact with other Discourses,
not only are novel (inter)texts constructed, but novel (inter)discourses arise.
These transformations occur through the incremental everyday actions of
individuals as they strategically appropriate and combine elements of different
Discourses as discourse in order to meet the needs of particular moments. Thus,
the relationship between Discourses and social action is not entirely one sided.
That is, communicative actions do not just reproduce Discourses, but can also
change them through the creative use of small d discourse. When we speak of
creativity from this perspective we are not just talking about changing language
in some clever or inventive way we are talking about changing the world.
When discourse is used creatively, it can potentially change the world on
two levels: first on the level of the immediate interaction by shifting the
relationships of power among participants, creativity reframing the activity that
is taking place, or otherwise creating possibilities for social action that did not
exist at the outset of the interaction, and second, on the level of society or culture
by contesting conventional orders of discourse and opening up possibilities for
the imagining of new kinds of social identities and new ways of seeing the world.
When a gay man in China, for example, uses the label tongzhi (comrade)
to refer to himself and other gay men, he appropriates a piece of discourse from
the very ideological system by which in the past he has been oppressed in a way
that cleverly disarms the oppressor. By playing on the terms multiple meanings
the gay comrade is able to simultaneously take up the positions of Party loyalist
and ironic dissident, to simultaneously claim belonging and cultural citizenship,
and to highlight how he has been unfairly marginalized. The use of the term in
different circumstances might serve different purposes to joke, to argue, or to
provoke and, while it might function in strategic ways to make these actions
more possible, none of these isolated instances will change the world. Social
change does come, however, through the accumulation of this new usage over
time in multiple situations across multiple domains as this use of the term is
appropriated into yet other Discourses, the Discourse of advertising, for
example, or the Discourse of entertainment, to the point where this subversive
usage has almost completely supplanted the original one (Jones 2007).
This way seeing creativity in discourse, as strategic and potentially world
transforming action seems to set the bar rather high, especially compared to the
focus on everyday creativity that is currently in vogue in applied linguistics. The
fact is, however, such creative actions are every bit as everyday literariness.
They are just not as obvious (which is one reason they are so effective). We are
constantly using rather conventional discourse in unconventional ways to
overcome the constraints imposed by Discourses and to transform social
situations and social relationships in our workplaces, in our relationships, and in
our public lives.

Going Beyond Texts

It should be obvious by now that an approach which locates creativity
not in language but in the actions that we use language to take and the broader
social implications of those actions cannot operate simply though the analysis of
texts. Rather it requires a multidimentional, ethnographic approach which traces
how people use texts in different circumstances, and which moves freely among
texts, social actors, situations, societies and histories. Take for example the
following piece of discourse which started out as the slogan for the Hong Kong
governments anti-triad publicity campaign in 1997 but was later recycled in a
number of other campaigns targeted at at-risk youth, including anti-drug
campaigns.
Take 2
 (Theres no take 2 in life)

A language and creativity approach would no doubt seize on such a slogan as an
example of everyday literariness of the kind that is common in advertising.
Such an approach would focus on the metaphor in the slogan which compares
life to a movie and might point out how it enables the authors to get across a
rather complex message in a memorable and economic way. It might even
consider the effect of this language upon its target audience (teenagers), and
make conjectures either about the cognitive processes readers might use to
interpret it or the kinds of social relationships it might construct between the
author (the government) and those to whom it is directed.
A sociolinguistic approach, on the other hand, might see the slogan as an
example of bilingual creativity, focusing on the code mixing of English lexis into a
Chinese message, a common linguistic practice in Hong Kong. Proponents of this
approach might also step back from the slogan itself to make more general
observations about how code mixing in Hong Kong tends to occur in particular
lexical domains, music and entertainment being one of them (Li 1996), and may
want to further explore the use of the English phrase take 2 in other contexts.
Finally, those whose interest extends to education might want to note the irony
of the governments use of mixed code in its own educational messages to
young people at that same time it was warning school teachers against such
practices in official educational policy papers.
At the end of the day, however, both of these analyses appear fairly
impoverished, especially if our goal is to find out something concrete and useful
about creativity and discourse.
A discourse and creativity approach like that outlined above would take a
rather different tact. First, it would concern itself less with the literariness or
inventiveness of the language, and instead ask what social actions this piece of
discourse were intended to accomplish and whether or not they were indeed
accomplished. It is not much use for an advertising slogan to be novel and
memorable if it does not have the desired effect on the public. It would also
consider the broader orders of discourse (or Discourses) within which the
slogan is situated, and what relationship these Discourse had with one another
during this particular historical moment in Hong Kong. Finally, it would ask what
people actually did with this slogan after it was transmitted to them: how did
they appropriate it into their own everyday actions and choices, and what can be
said to be creative about these acts of appropriation and adaptation? In other
words, in order to really understand if, why and how this piece of discourse is
creative, the analyst needs to go beyond just looking at the discourse itself.
Observations about metaphor and code mixing, for example, are apt to
miss the point when it comes to creativity in this particular instance. What
makes the slogan not just novel but also fitting for this specific time and place is
not just its intertextuality, the appropriation of the English phrase take 2, but
also the interdiscursivity which this mixing creates, in particular the introduction
of the Discourse of entertainment into the voice of the government. This
particular mixture of Discourses is especially fitting because at this particular
time in Hong Kong the entertainment industry was widely seen by the
government and the public as glorifying gang activity and essentially promoting
it to young people, particularly in a series of controversial films released shortly
before this campaign by director Andrew Wong called Young and Dangerous.
These films portrayed a comic book inspired version of the gangster hero in a
style that particularly appealed to young people (Vesia 2002), and so particularly
alarmed their parents and teachers. The slogan seeks to undermine the
attraction of the triad societies for young people not simply by using a clever
metaphor, but by indirectly alluding to an active public debate on the role of
entertainment in the increase in youth crime. Understanding the creative
interdiscursivity of the slogan is really not possible without this historical
information.
At the same time, other layers of interdiscursivity are also present in the
slogan. There is, for example, the fact that much of Hong Kongs entertainment
industry was itself, at least until the mid nineties heavily controlled by organized
crime (Dannen 1997), as well as the fact that the campaign came a few months
before the return to Chinese sovereignty whose run-up had been peppered with
rumors of supposed ties between the PRC government and Hong Kongs triad
societies, fuelled by China's minister for public security Tao Sijus 1994
statement that some members of Hong Kongs gangs were patriotic citizens and
had a role to play in building the nation (Vines 1998).
When we look beyond the linguistic creativity in this phrase, we come
across a more complex network of discursive (and interdiscursive) creativity
that links this slogan to history, politics, and popular culture in ways that, while
they might escape the analyst focusing on the everyday use of metaphor would
not have escaped those who created the phrase or the Hong Kong citizens who
heard it at that time.
Beyond focusing on the web of interdiscursivity implicated by this bit of
language, a discourse and creativity approach would also want to consider the
role of this phrase in various social actions, asking what actions this creative
piece of discourse were intended to be used for, if those actions were actually
successful, and what other kinds of actions, perhaps unintended, might it have
been appropriated in the service of.
The answer to the first question seems rather obvious: that the slogan
was intended to carry out the action of persuading young people to avoid gang
activity and, in its later uses by the government, a range of other dangerous
activities associated with juvenile delinquency such as drug use. It is more
difficult to assess its success in doing this beyond noting that there is no
evidence that youth triad activity in Hong Kong decreased after the launch of this
campaign (in fact, just the opposite, see Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups
1999), and drug use by adolescents in Hong Kong actually increased dramatically
after this slogan began being circulated, the number of reported new drug users
under the age of 21 nearly doubling from between the years 1997 and 2000
(Central Registry of Drug Abuse 2010, Hong Kong Council of Social Services
2000).
Of course it would be unfair to attribute these facts solely to the failure of
this campaign, particularly given all of the other sociocultural factors involved.
However, there is some evidence that this slogan may have had unintended
consequences, and some of those consequences might have been partly the
result of its creativity, the playful ambiguity created through its intertextual
borrowing.
 Some evidence for this can be found in an ethnographic study of the effect
of Hong Kong government anti-drug media messages on the attitudes and
behavior of at risk young people at different stages of their involvement with
drugs which I conducted in the late nineties not long after this slogan began
being used (Jones 1999, 2005).
In interviews and focus groups with participants in the study I found not
just that this and similar slogans did not go very far in persuading young people,
particularly those already involved with drugs and gangs, but that in fact many
participants were adept at twisting such slogans to justify their behavior. This
was particularly common among active drug users who, in their discourse,
associated their drug use and gang affiliation with adventurousness and fun.
When asked how he interpreted this particular slogan, for example, one
participant said: You only live once, right? So youve got to do all you can. Thats
what makes us different. We're willing to take the risk when other people arent.
Another said, 'What this means to me is take every chance you canjust do it!
(Jones 1999:6). Although this may be far from what the authors of the slogan
intended, it is also an example of discursive creativity, the strategic
appropriation of the voice of another to fit ones own purposes, not much
different from the Chinese gay mans appropriation of the label comrade which I
mentioned above.
This slogan was seen as even less effective by those in the study who were
in recovery from drug abuse. For this group, the effect of the slogan was to
undermine their recovery by denying the possibility that a second chance was
possible. As one participant put it: I recall one slogan of the advertisement is
life has no take two, please be careful. If this is true, Ill do whatever I want and
not care about the consequence. You wont stop taking drugs even if you know
how bad the consequences are. From the point of view of drug users, this kind of
API is useless (Jones 1999:8).
Participants in this group, however, were also able to creatively
transform this slogan. As part of the study, I provided my participants with video
equipment and a short course in video production and asked them to produce
their own television commercials about drugs. The commercial produced by this
group of young people in recovery was particularly telling. It started off as a
series of scenes depicting drug use, crime, gang activity, and the consequences of
these actions -- shooting up in a toilet, purse snatching, buying and selling
heroin, altercations with friends, family members, and the police, and finally a
coffin. This was followed by the very same scenes played in reverse, the coffin
emerging from the ground, the purse whisked back into the arms of its owner,
the syringe exiting the arm rather than entering it, and then the slogan
Take 2 (There is a take 2 in life). It is here, I suggest, that we can see a real
example of discursive creativity, a creativity that far exceeds in value the clever
manipulation of words by the original slogans authors. In the act of
appropriating and transforming this slogan in the context of retelling their own
experiences, these young people managed to both contest the narrow and
simplistic approach embodied in it and to open up discursive space for their own
continued recovery.
Of course, the story of this slogan is far from over. Since I conducted the
research I described above, it has continued to be appropriated and adapted into
multiple contexts for multiple purposes. An internet search of the exact phrase
results in over 10,700 hits including examples of the phrase being taken up by
electronics manufacturers, Christian churches, comedians, pop-singers, school
guidance counselors and adolescent bloggers, each time twisted into a different
meaning as it is adapted for different social actions. Bauman (2004: 10) speaks of
how the dynamics of recontextualization that occur as texts are continually
reported, rehearsed, translated, relayed, quoted, summarised, or parodied work
to open up ways to a recognition of alternative and shifting frames available to
those who appropriate them. It is in such acts of recontextualization, rather than
in the formal aspects of language, that the approach I am describing locates
creativity.
This analysis, cursory as it is, illustrates some of the chief methodological
implications of a discourse and creativity approach: that it requires not just
reading the text, but reading around the text and understanding the networks of
interdiscursivity of which it is a part; that it also often requires ethnographic
methods like participant observation, interviews and other means of getting at
the creative ways texts are appropriated into different situations and the ways
they cycle through different historical circumstances; and finally, that it may
sometimes involve more interventionalist methods like introducing new
meditational means into communities and situations in order to stimulate
creativity.
This example also illustrates the three major theoretical concerns of a
discourse and creativity approach. First is the concern for interdiscursivity, how
hybridity not just in small d discourse (e.g. code mixing and intertextuality) but
in big D Discourses can open up possibilities for creative action. Attention to
interdiscusivity allows us to make the link between specific texts in specific
contexts and the societies and cultures in which they are produced and
consumed. It helps us to uncover how ideology operates in the ways we use
language, and how by creating new interdiscursive links, speakers and writers
can sometimes reveal the cracks in the operation of ideology. Finally, it reminds
us that creativity involves not just the creation of novel texts and intertexts, but
of novel interdiscourses and thus new ways of speaking, thinking and being.
Second is the notion of strategic action, the idea that through
appropriating and mixing texts and discourses in creative ways, speakers and
writers are sometimes able to open up space for actions and identities that were
not previously possible. Creativity is to a large extent a matter of finding our way
around constraints or limitations placed on us by the Discourses within which
we operate. As Fairclough (1992:91) puts it: subjects are ideologically
positioned, but they are also capable of acting creatively to make their own
connections between the diverse practices and ideologies to which they are
exposed, and to restructure positioning practices and structures.
Finally, and most importantly, a discourse and creativity approach is
concerned with how, though producing new meanings, new practices, and new
ways of organizing their relationships through discourse, people can function as
agents for social and cultural change. This concern need not be simply a matter
of observing and describing the world changing actions of others, but might also
involve considering how, though our actions as researchers we can work
together with our participants to create positive change by inventing alternative
discourses/Discourses that generate the possibility of new ways of acting and
interacting.
Conclusion: Discourse and Creativity in World Englishes
In some ways I have framed this approach to creativity which privileges
discourse (with both a small and a big D) over language as something new. An
inspection of the pages of World Englishes over the past thirty years, however,
reveals many examples of work that explores the ways people strategically
marshal small d discourse in specific sociocultural contexts to subvert or
overcome the constraints placed on them by big D Discourses. One could hardly
find, for example, a better treatment of creative interdiscursivity than Bhatias
(2008) analysis of how the financial reports of multinational corporations mix
the Discourses of economics, accounting, law and public relations, strategically in
ways that discourage unintended interpretation of corporate objectives (325).
Another notable example is Martins (1997) account of how French advertisers
creatively manipulate copyright, multimodal glossing, and other techniques in
order to ingeniously circumvent French language laws that prohibit the use of
English. Still another is Moriels (1998) analysis of how the transgendered Israeli
pop singer Dana International sings in an idiosyncratic gender-free pastiche of
English, French, Arabic and Hebrew, thus non-confrontationally opening up
space for her unconventional performances of sexuality in the conservative
social context of the Middle East.
One of the best representations of an approach focusing on strategic
creativity in interaction is the work of Chew on university admissions interviews
in Singapore. While in her 1997 article in World Englishes she focuses mainly on
how powerful participants exert generic power over the interaction, in her
earlier work (1995) she focuses more on the strategies interviewees use to
subvert generic constraints, overcome challenges from interviewers, and
reframe questions to their own advantage, a phenomenon which she refers to as
aikido politics.
Aside from these and the many other examples of studies that explore
language as it is employed to take strategic action, it could be argued that the
entire journal represents an orientation towards discourse and creativity. World
Englishes is itself a creative interdiscourse, a nexus of applied linguistics,
sociolinguistics, critical linguistics, lexicography, literature and literary criticism,
education, commerce and the voices of everyday life in a globalized world which
has resulted in a paradigm shift (Bolton 2005) not just in research and teaching
in English studies, but also in educational practice, language policy, literature
and the arts, journalism and politics. Its ultimate goal is not as much to discover
or debate about new linguistic forms as to break down social and intellectual
dichotomies (us and them, native speaker and non-native speaker, teacher and
learner, developed world and developing world), to alter relationships of power
between nations and between individuals (Kachru 1986b), to undermine the
institutionalized stigmatization of local language users, and to make available to
English users all over the world the communicative resources to grapple
creatively with the complex political, social, cultural, religious, environmental
and economic issues with which we are faced.


References

Baker, W. and Eggington, W. G. (1999) Bilingual creativity, multidimensional
analysis, and world Englishes. World Englishes 18 (3): 343-357.
Bauman, R. (2004) A world of others words: Cross-cultural perspectives on
intertextuality. London: Blackwell.
Baumgardner, R. J. (2006) The appeal of English in Mexican commerce. World
Englishes 25 (2): 251-266.
Bhatia, A. (2007) Religious metaphor in the discourse of illusion: George W. Bush
and Osama bin Laden, World Englishes 26 (4)- 507524.
Bhatia, V. (2008) Creativity and accessibility in written professional discourse.
World Englishes 27 (3/4): 319326.
Bhatia, V.K., Flowerdew, J. and Jones, R. (eds.) (2007) Advances in discourse
studies. London: Routledge.
Black, E. (2006) Pragmatic stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bolton, K. (2005) Where WE stands: approaches, issues, and debate in world
Englishes. World Englishes 24 (1): 6983.
Bolton, K. and Davis, D. D. (2006) A content analysis of World Englishes. World
Englishes 25 (1): 56.
Boden, M. A. (1990) The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. 2nd Edition.
London: Routledge.
Candlin, C.N. and Maley, Y. (1997) Interdiscursivity in the discourse of alternate
dispute resolution. In B. Cunnarsson, P. Linell and B. Nordberg (eds.) The
construction of professional discourse. London: Longman, pp. 201-222.
Carter, R. (2004) Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London. New
York: Routledge.
Carter, R. (2007) Response to Special Issue of Applied Linguistics devoted to
Language Creativity in Everyday Contexts. Applied Linguistics 28 (4): 597-
608.
Central Registry of Drug Abuse, Government of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region (2010) Statistical tables, Retrieved from the World
Wide Web June 23, 2010 at http://cs-crda.nd.gov.hk/en/introduction.asp
Chew, P. G. L. (1995) Aikido politics in interview interaction. Linguistics and
Education 7: 201-220.
Chew, P. G. L. (1997) Generic power at the gate. World Englishes 16 (3), pp. 395-
405.
Cook, G. (1994) Discourse and literature: The interplay of form and mind. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Cook, Guy (1998) Linguistics and language teaching. In K. Johnson and H.
Johnson (eds.) The encyclopedic dictionary of applied linguistics. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 198207.
Cook, G. 2000. Language play, language learning. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Cook, G. (2001) The discourse of advertising 2nd Edition. London: Routledge.
Crystal, D. (1998) Language play. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Dannen, F. (1997) Partners in crime. The New Republic July 14 & 21, Retrieved
from the World Wide Web July 23, 2101 at
http://www.copi.com/articles/triads1.html and
http://www.copi.com/articles/triads2.html
Dissanayake, W. (1985) Towards a decolonized English: South Asian creativity in
fiction. World Englishes 4 (2): 233-242.
Dsouza J. 1988. Interactional strategies in South Asian languages: their
implications for teaching English internationally. World Englishes 7:159
71.
Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and power. London: Longman.
Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge & The discourse on language
(A. M. Sheridan-Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon.
Fowler, R. (1996) Linguistic criticism, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gee, J.P. (1996) Social linguistics and literacies (2nd edition). London: Taylor and
Francis.
Hong Kong Council of Social Services (2000) The serious situation of adolescents
abusing drugs on the Mainland. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Council of Social
Services.
Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups (1999) Youth Study Series No. 23 A
study on youth gangs in new town development. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
Federation of Youth Groups.
Jakobson, R. (1960) Linguistics and poetics. In T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in language.
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, pp. 350-377.
Jones, R. (1998) Condoms and consumerism: Ethical discourse of selling AIDS in
China. In H.M. Chan (ed.) Values and society Vol. 2. Beijing: China Social
Science Publishing House.
Jones, R. (1999) Their own words, their own world: Empowering at-risk young
people in drug education. A Report to the Health Care and Promotion
Fund. Hong Kong: Health Care and Promotion Fund.
Jones, R. (2005) Mediated addiction: The drug discourses of Hong Kong youth,
Health, Risk and Society 7: (1): 25-45.
Jones, R. (2007) Imagined comrades and imaginary protections: Identity,
community and sexual risk among men who have sex with men in China,
Journal of Homosexuality 53 (3): 83-115.
Jucker, A. H. (1992) Social stylistics: syntactic variation in British newspapers.
Berlin: Mouton de Guyter.
Kachru (1985) The bilinguals' creativity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 6:
20-33.
Kachru, B. B. (1986a) The alchemy of English: the spread, functions, and models of
non-native Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Kachru, B. B. (1986b) The power and politics of English. World Englishes 5 (2/3):
121-140.
Kachru Y. 1993. Social meaning and creativity in Indian English speech acts. In J.
E. Alatis (ed.) Language, Communication, and Social Meaning. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 37887.
Leech, G. and Short, M. H. (1981) Style in fiction: A linguistic introduction to
English fictional prose. London: Longman.
Li, D.C.S. (1996) Issues in bilingualism and biculturalism: A Hong Kong case study.
New York: Peter Lang.
Lin, A. M. Y. (2000). Lively children trapped in an island of disadvantage: Verbal
play of Cantonese working class schoolboys in Hong Kong. The
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 143: 63-83.
Magnusson, L. (1999) Shakespeare and social dialogue: Dramatic language and
Elizabethan letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, E. (2007) Frenglish for sale: multilingual discourses for addressing
todays global consumer. World Englishes 26 (2): 170188.
Maybin, J. and Swann, J. (2006) The art of English: Everyday creativity.
Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maybin, J. and Swann, J. (2007a) Language creativity in everyday contexts.
Applied Linguistics 28 (40: 491608.
Maybin, J. and Swann, J. (2007b). Everyday creativity in language: textuality,
contextuality and critique. Applied Linguistics, 28(4), pp. 497517.
Moriel, L. (1998) Diva in the promised land: a blueprint for newspeak? World
Englishes 17 (2):225-237.
Nelson, C. L. (1988) The pragmatic dimension of creativity in the other tongue.
World Englishes 7 (2): 173-181.
Nelson, C. L. (1992) Bilingual writing for the monolingual reader. World Englishes
11 (2/3): 271-275.
Norrick, N. (2000) Conversational narrative. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Osakwe, M. I. (1999) Wole Soyinkas poetry as bilinguals creativity. World
Englishes 18 (1): 63-77.
Pomerantz, A. and Bell, N. D. (2007) Learning to play, playing to learn: FL
learners as multicompetent language users. Applied Linguistics 28(4):556-
578.
Pope, R. (2005) Creativity: Theory, history, practice. London: Routledge.
Pratt, M.L. (1977) Toward a speech act theory of literary discourse. Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Rampton, B. (2005) Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents, 2nd
Edition. Manchester: St Jerome Press
Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., and Hamilton, H. E. (eds.) (2001) The handbook of
discourse analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004) Corpus stylistics: Speech, writing and thought
presentation in a corpus of English writing, London : Routledge.
Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A resource book for students. London: Routledge.
Simpson, P. and Hall, G. (2002) Discourse analysis and stylistics. Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics 22:136-149.
Stockwell, P. (2002) Cognitive stylistics: Language and cognition in text analysis.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Stubbs, M. (1983) Discourse analysis: the sociolinguistic analysis of natural
language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Swann, J, and Maybin, J. (2007) Language creativity in everyday contexts. Applied
Linguistics 28 (4): 491496.
Vesia, M. (2002) The gangster as hero in Hong Kong cinema. Retrieved from the
World Wide Web June 22, 2010 at
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/hkgangster.html
Vines, S. (1998) Chinese rule boosts Hong Kong triads: Criminal gangs are
enjoying even greater power under Peking's protection. The Independent,
Sunday, 22 March, Retrieved from the World Wide Web June 23 2010 at
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/chinese-rule-boosts-hong-kong-
triads-1151782.html
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in society: the development of higher psychological
processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (1975) Stylistics and the teaching of literature. London:
Longman.
Widdowson, H.G. (2008) Language creativity and the poetic function: A response
to Swann and Maybin (2007). Applied Linguistics 29 (3): 503-508.
Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and
religious belief, C. Barrett (ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.